Resignation at Williamsburg

The last thing President Pomfret seemed to care about was a big-time football team. Though he looked more like a small-town banker than a scholar, John Edwin Pomfret had won a solid reputation as a historian at the University of South Carolina and Princeton long before he came to Virginia's ancient* College of William and Mary (enrollment 1,800). When William and Mary called him in 1942, he was dean of the graduate school at Vanderbilt University. His plan for W. & M.: to give it one of the first-rate academic programs in the South.

But John Pomfret was almost too academic for his own good. The things that began to boom loudest on the shady Williamsburg campus were the things he concerned himself with least. For the first time, the football team began to take on such powerhouses as Michigan State and Boston University. The basketball team played in Madison Square Garden.

William and Mary's varsity teams began to make news.

Last July, the news turned sour. Williamsburg began to hear ugly rumors about the athletic department. Football Coach Rube McCray and Basketball Coach Barney Wilson suddenly resigned. At that point, the Board of Visitors decided to investigate. The board found that, as far back as 1949, the athletic department had been falsifying the high-school transcripts of promising athletes to make sure they would get into the college. And last spring, Dean Nelson Marshall had found that the department had been giving unearned credits in physical education. But it was not until July, just before the two coaches resigned, that the president got around to summoning them to an inquiry. Meanwhile, he had even recommended Coach McCray for a promotion--to a lifetime tenure as a full professor of physical education.

To the Board of Visitors the administration seemed clearly guilty of negligence: "The entire situation is one which could and should have been handled with dispatch." Last week President Pomfret took the board's statement as a vote of noconfidence, handed in his resignation.

*The three oldest U.S. colleges: Harvard, chartered 1636; William and Mary, 1693; Yale, 1701.

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